shakran

Interesting example. The dams beavers build tend to be fairly ecologically sound. They don't heat up the water, they don't kill fish - in fact they create places for fish to live, and they're not made of gobs of concrete which leaches harmful chemicals. They don't have to form a committee to study the feasibility and cost/benefit analysis of building the dam, they don't have to deal with contractors, lawsuits from the Sierra Club, or other beavers jumping off the top of the completed dam to commit suicide. In short, they build the damn dam and do it much more peacefully, efficiently, and ethically than we possibly can. Doesn't sound so stupid to me.

Why the hell would a bird need a skyscraper? Part of the reason we invent what we invent is because we perceive a need for it. The needs of a bird are simple. Food. Basic shelter. Someone to mate with. If that's all we needed, then we wouldn't build skyscrapers.

Additionally, comparing intelligence solely on what something has built has some unfortunate implications - - "gee, I've built more stuff than you, and therefore you're a moron."

Clearly. I'm not positing that animals are smarter than humans by our standards. But, by the dolphin's standards, we're probably pretty fucking moronic. We run around scrabbling for resources, fighting each other over little green pieces of paper, getting fat because we sit in front of glowing boxes and argue with each other, shooting each other because we want something that someone else has, poisoning the air that we must have in order to live, destroying our food in contraptions that poison the air while conveying us to places where we either collect or divest ourselves of more green pieces of paper, and meanwhile the dolphins are messing around in the ocean, playing and eating, and only occasionally having to fight off a shark.

The fact that we got together and decided to create devices which can destroy us and everything else on the planet, points more to our abject stupidity than to our intelligence.